openSUSE 11.4 was released on Thursday the 10th of March 2011. 11.4 stands in the openSUSE tradition of delivering the latest technology while maintaining stability. It brought significant improvements along with the latest in Free Software applications. openSUSE 11.4 is the last release of openSUSE to include GNOME® 2, with GNOME® 3.2 being introduced in openSUSE 12.1.

openSUSE the latest major Free Software desktops, all with a high level of polish and support.

The default openSUSE desktop, the KDE® Plasma Desktop, introduces easier Activity management, much better performance as well as usability and feature improvements to battery, network and bluetooth handling. The Workspace applications bring a new faceted search in Dolphin and the social sharing plugins like Flickr, Facebook and Picasaweb are now easy to reach from Gwenview and other applications. Read more

The latest release in the 2.x series, GNOME® 2.32 in openSUSE 11.4 brings you Time Tracker, also known as Project Hamster and Empathy features like meta-contacts and quick search. Evolution became faster and Banshee supports MusicBrainz metadata fetching and more portable music devices. openSUSE also makes available snapshots of the upcoming GNOME® 3 and GNOME® Shell which brings a much more fluent and intuitive workflow to your computer integrating messaging and window tiling. Read more

LXDE, our 4th official desktop, has not seen a major release but several smaller fixes and improvements have been made. Read more

In all cases, extensive work has been done on integration in openSUSE. This includes making sure file associations make sense as well as picking sane default apps to include.

Firefox and LibreOffice have been modified to use native file dialogs and notifications and respecting the default file associations under a Plasma Workspace, and the the Celadon Stripes artwork and theming has been applied in all desktops. The Xfce desktop pattern has been extended to include functionality like office and image editing by default. Also, additional keyboard shortcuts have been defined to control volume or take screen shots and the menu layout has been tidied up.

Of course openSUSE 11.4 ships with all the major applications from the KDE® Community and GNOME® Project as well as the wider Free Software world. Read here for a selection of what's new!

The first shipping LibreOffice and Firefox 4

LibreOffice Writer under LXDE

openSUSE is the first major Linux distribution to ship LibreOffice 3.3.1 in a stable release, in part thanks to the strong involvement of openSUSE developers within the LibreOffice community.
The first LibreOffice release introduces the ability to import and edit SVG files in Draw, support for up to 1 million rows in Calc and made slide layout handling in Impress easier. There also have been large cleanups to the LibreOffice codebase improving stability as well as startup performance. For developers interested in working on LibreOffice, openSUSE offers unique ‘split build’ development packages making it much easier to start hacking on LibreOffice. Read more

Firefox with the Moonlight plugin under XFCE

Firefox 4 introduces a major redesign of both the UI and the rendering engine. Tabs now live at the top of the window to emphasize the relation between a web page and the toolbar. They can be re-arranged and grouped and sites can be pinned to the tab bar. Firefox Sync allows synchronization of bookmarks, history, passwords and tabs between installations of Firefox on different systems.

The rendering engine of Firefox now employs hardware acceleration where available. There have been large speedups to page rendering and the handling of large numbers of tabs. Firefox 4.0 also introduces support for major new web standards like WebM and HTML5 allowing web designers to make better sites with less effort. Read more

More robust and faster package management

Repository management in YaST

openSUSE's ZYpp package management introduces a new MultiCurl backend, support for zsync transfers and Metalink download support. Thanks to these changes, repository refresh and package install or update has become significantly faster. Downloads now happen simultaneously from multiple servers and only changed parts of files will be fetched. Robustness has also been improved and the new backend gives better support for network proxies while allowing for HTTP BASIC password-protected repositories. The updater applets have also been changed. The KDE applet has been replaced by KPackageKit and both applets will now default to installing updates, not just patches. Read more